My uncle Harry is the boy on the far left as Auschwitz was being liberated by soldiers of the Ukrainian Front of the Soviet Red Army January 27, 1945. He was 17 years old.

The mission of liberating the city of Oswiecim and the Auschwitz camp fell to the soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front, who advanced along the left bank of the Vistula from Cracow towards Upper Silesia. The 100th Lvov Infantry Division, under General-Major Fyodor Krasavin, was directly involved in the Oswiecim operation.

Soldiers crossed the Vistula on January 26. The next day, Saturday morning, division reconnaissance entered the grounds of the Monowitz sub-camp. They liberated the center of Oswiecim at noon. After a brief skirmish with the retreating Germans, they simultaneously entered the grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, about 3 kilometers away, at 3:00 p.m.

Soviet losses in the liberation of Auschwitz, Birkenau, Monowitz, and the city of Oswiecim amounted to 231 officers and men, including Lt. Col. Semen Byesprozwanniy, commander of the 472nd Battalion, who was posthumously awarded the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit of the Polish Republic by Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski in 2000.

A total of about 7,000 prisoners were liberated in Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Monowitz. The Red Army also freed about 500 prisoners in several sub-camps.

The last general roll call in Auschwitz held on January 17, 1945 (10 days before liberation) reported 67,012 prisoners

A recently discovered photo album reveals Auschwitz killers (including Josef Mengele and camp commandant Rudolf Hoess) relaxing with fun and singalongs, not far from the gas chambers and ovens. A sobering reminder of the banality of evil. Yakov Smirnov

When I was a kid, Dwight Eisenhower was president. I couldn't ever imagine why he was so popular. Maybe this has something to do with it:

My Uncle Harry Lawsky appears in the picture below at the far left. See also the top of this thread.

General Eisenhower Warned Us

Although soldiers had witnessed all the horrors of war, the condition of the prisoners was even more shocking. It was beyond any war scene that the soldiers had experienced. There were rows upon rows of bodies stacked up like cordwood. Liberators struggled to make sense of the scenes they witnessed. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote a letter to the Chief of Staff George Marshall dated April 1945: " I have never felt able to describe my emotional reaction when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. I visited every nook and cranny of the camps because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or assumption that the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda." Eisenhower's comment shows his foresight in thinking that we must preserve documentation and photographs to remind the world of the horrors that took place in the concentration camps. Nobody can deny the vivid scenes and descriptions of the Holocaust. Nobody can forget.

(Lewin, Rhoda G. The Last Days of the War. New Hampshire: Literary History. 1962.)

65 years after World War II, this post memorializes 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians, and 1,900 Catholic priests Who were 'murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on and humiliated' while the German people looked the other way!

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has gone way beyond rhetorical attacks on the United States and Israel when, on December 14, 2005, he suggested that the Holocaust was a myth. In fact, to this day the Iranian Foreign Ministry continues to promote Holocaust denial. This must stop! NEVER AGAIN

"Indeed it is difficult for all other nations of the world to live in the presence of the Jews. It is irritating and most uncomfortable. The Jews embarrass the world as they have done things which are beyond the imaginable. They have become moral strangers since the day their forefather, Abraham, introduced the world to high ethical standards and to the fear of Heaven. They brought the world the Ten Commandments, which many nations prefer to defy. They violated the rules of history by staying alive, totally at odds with common sense and historical evidence. They outlived all their former enemies, including vast empires such as the Romans and the Greeks. They angered the world with their return to their homeland after 2000 years of exile and after the murder of six million of their brothers and sisters.

They aggravated mankind by building, in the wink of an eye, a democratic State which others were not able to create in even hundreds of years. They built living monuments such as the duty to be holy and the privilege to serve one's fellow men.

They had their hands in every human progressive endeavor, whether in science, medicine, psychology or any other discipline, while totally out of proportion to their actual numbers. They gave the world the Bible and even their "savior."

Jews taught the world not to accept the world as it is, but to transform it, yet only a few nations wanted to listen. Moreover, the Jews introduced the world to one God, yet only a minority wanted to draw the moral consequences. So the nations of the world realize that they would have been lost without the Jews... And while their subconscious tries to remind them of how much of Western civilization is framed in terms of concepts first articulated by the Jews, they do anything to suppress it.

They deny that Jews remind them of a higher purpose of life and the need to be honorable, and do anything to escape its consequences... It is simply too much to handle for them, too embarrassing to admit, and above all, too difficult to live by.

So the nations of the world decided once again to go out of 'their' way in order to find a stick to hit the Jews. The goal: to prove that Jews are as immoral and guilty of massacre and genocide as some of they themselves are.

All this in order to hide and justify their own failure to even protest when six million Jews were brought to the slaughterhouses of Auschwitz and Dachau; so as to wipe out the moral conscience of which the Jews remind them, and they found a stick.

Nothing could be more gratifying for them than to find the Jews in a struggle with another people (who are completely terrorized by their own leaders) against whom the Jews, against their best wishes, have to defend themselves in order to survive. With great satisfaction, the world allows and initiates the rewriting of history so as to fuel the rage of yet another people against the Jews. This in spite of the fact that the nations understand very well that peace between the parties could have come a long time ago, if only the Jews would have had a fair chance. Instead, they happily jumped on the wagon of hate so as to justify their jealousy of the Jews and their incompetence to deal with their own moral issues.

When Jews look at the bizarre play taking place in The Hague , they can only smile as this artificial game once more proves how the world paradoxically admits the Jews' uniqueness. It is in their need to undermine the Jews that they actually raise them.

The study of history of Europe during the past centuries teaches us one uniform lesson: That the nations which received and in any way dealt fairly and mercifully with the Jew have prospered; and that the nations that have tortured and oppressed them have written out their own curse."

"Man of History" by Samantha Rose Lawsky is available through Lulu Books as of March 7, 2013. Please support her work by clicking the image below. This takes you to the Lulu Book publishing site.

Heniek Wroczlawski, a survivor of Auschwitz, had kept most memories of the Holocaust to himself until two events occurred in 2006. First, his family showed him a photograph, newly culled from archives, of Heniek with a group of children behind a fence at Auschwitz just before liberation. Secondly, a very curious granddaughter began asking questions, and Heniek decided to talk.